Our work relationship with our client Elisabeth Ruge is based on our mutual fondness of literature and interest in the effects of technological progress. So when the opportunity arrived to give a talk together, we chose to use our dualism between literature and technology as the format.

Last Saturday, the digital indie-publishing scene got together at Supermarkt in Berlin-Wedding for the Electric Book Fair. Elisabeth Ruge and I (Johannes) talked about ‘Reading in the 21st century’ making the case that we’re reading more then ever. We looked at different aspects like the serialization of novels, customized/algorithmic novels and social reading with her providing the historic/literary perspective and me talking about the technological facets. Our main examples was once again Wattpad, which for me remains one of the strongest signals for what reading (and thus writing) might become in the near future.

Our goal was to show that one can’t really separate those two sides or, to be more precise, that one shouldn’t to be successful. From what I can tell, the talk was received well.

Elisabeth and I will host a workshop at the Epublish Congress in November.

Author: Johannes

Johannes is a strategist and consultant for digital communications. His work is informed by his experience of working with brands like Deutsche Telekom, MTV, Postbank, Maggi and Nike and by his insatiable appetite for finding the bigger patterns behind current developments in technology and science. Holding a diploma in Media System Design, Johannes is a regular speaker at web and marketing conferences like Republica and the Social Media Summit.
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